Rotating detonation rocket engine, or RDRE hot fire test at Marshall Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA
As
Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and primary collaborator IN Space LLC, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, are confirming data from RDRE hot fire tests conducted in 2022 at Marshall’s East Test Area. The engine was fired over a dozen times, totaling nearly 10 minutes in duration.
The RDRE achieved its primary test objective by demonstrating that its hardware – made from novel additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, designs and processes – could operate for long durations while withstanding the extreme heat and pressure environments generated by detonations. While operating at full throttle, the RDRE produced over 4,000 pounds of thrust for nearly a minute at an average chamber pressure of 622 pounds per square inch, the highest pressure rating for this design on record.
Rotating detonation rocket engine, or RDRE hot fire test at Marshall Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA
The RDRE incorporates the NASA-developed copper-
Thrust propulsion testing and characterization of the University of Central Florida rotating detonation rocket engine is shown in this photo. NASA provided funding for a UCF project focused on rotating detonation rocket engines, which use high-energy explosions to produce more energy with less fuel, improving engine efficiency and cutting down space travel costs and emissions. Credit: UCF
RDRE is managed and funded by the Game Changing Development Program in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.
The enormous Space Launch System passed its first test with flying colors, NASA’s preliminary analysis concludes, and the rocket and Orion capsule are good to go for their next mission: Artemis II, which will carry a crew to lunar orbit.
After numerous delays and enormous cost overruns, some worried that the SLS (nicknamed the “Mega Moon Rocket”) would never actually take off. But the launch in November went off (mostly) without a hitch, as did the 25-day mission undertaken by an uncrewed Orion capsule.
While its success was apparent, it wasn’t a case of all or nothing. Reams of data needed to be analyzed by NASA’s teams to make sure that Artemis I didn’t succeed in spite of serious problems. Fortunately that does not seem to be the case: Although the teams are still working through the terabytes of raw data, the agency has pronounced the mission good enough to endorse its sequel.
“Building off the assessment conducted shortly after launch, the preliminary post-flight data indicates that all SLS systems performed exceptionally and that the designs are ready to support a crewed flight on Artemis II,” wrote NASA in a news post.
Emphasizing the point, SLS Program manager John Honeycutt is quoted as follows:
The correlation between actual flight performance and predicted performance for Artemis I was excellent. There is engineering and an art to successfully building and launching a rocket, and the analysis on the SLS rocket’s inaugural flight puts NASA and its partners in a good position to power missions for Artemis II and beyond.
Key pressures, temperatures, and other values were all within 2 percent of predictions. No doubt the team is working on narrowing that delta even now.
Artemis II’s crewed mission obviously depended entirely on the success of Artemis I, and this is the clearest indication since launch that the SLS and Orion are quantifiably good enough. It’s a big step to say, “Yes, we’re moving forward with putting astronauts on this thing,” but of course there’s a lot more work to come before it takes place. Artemis I’s timeline didn’t exactly go as planned but having verified that the rocket works as expected may help hurry along the next part of NASA’s big plan to return to the moon.
NASA’s mission to an asteroid that could be worth 70,000 times the global economy is expected to begin this year.
The space agency decided back in 2017 that humankind would benefit from a closer look at 16 Psyche. The Psyche mission was initially slated to take place at the end of 2022 but was delayed due to “development problems.” NASA is now planning to launch the Psyche spacecraft this October. The vessel should reach the ultra-valuable asteroid in August 2029.
Here’s everything we know so far about the Psyche asteroid, the upcoming Psyche mission and the Psyche spacecraft.
What Is 16 Psyche?
Artist’s concept of the asteroid 16 Psyche.
Maxar/ASU/P. Rubin/NASA/JPL-Calt
Named after the Greek goddess of the soul, Psyche was discovered by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis on March 17, 1852. The giant M-Type asteroid is thought to be the partial core of a small planet that failed to fully form during the earliest days of our solar system.
The metal-rich asteroid is about the size of Massachusetts and shaped somewhat like a potato, according to astronomers. Its average diameter is about 140 miles—or roughly the distance between Los Angeles and San Diego. The asteroid orbits between Mars and Jupiter at a distance ranging from 235 million to 309 million miles from the Sun. (You can get a real-time simulated view of Psyche here.)
A study published by The Planetary Science Journal in 2020 suggests that Psyche is made almost entirely of iron and nickel. This metallic composition sets it apart from other asteroids that are usually comprised of rock or ice, and could suggest it was originally part of a planetary core. That would not only represent a momentous discovery, it’s key to Psyche’s potential astronomical value: NASA scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton calculated that the iron in the asteroid alone could be worth as much as $10,000 quadrillion (yes, you read that right). For context, the entire global economy is worth roughly $110 trillion as of writing. However, more recent research out of the University of Arizona suggests that the asteroid might not be as metallic or dense as once thought. Psyche could actually be closer to a rubble pile, rather than an exposed planetary core, the research claims. If true, this would devalue the asteroid. NASA’s upcoming mission should settle the debate about Pysche’s composition for once and all.
Of course, Psyche isn’t the only valuable rock in space. NASA has previously said the belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter holds mineral wealth equivalent to about $100 billion for every individual on Earth. Mining the precious metals within each asteroid and successfully getting them back down to earth is the hard part. Then you have the whole supply and demand conundrum that could drive the price of specific metals up or down. We’ll leave the complexities of space mining for another day.
Why Is NASA Traveling to 16 Psyche?
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft in December 2022.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
If Psyche is, in fact, the leftover core of a planet that never properly formed, it could reveal secrets about Earth’s own core. The interior of terrestrial planets is normally hidden beneath the mantle and crust, but Psyche has no such outer layers. The asteroid’s mantle and crust were likely stripped away by multiple violent collisions during our solar system’s early formation. By examining Psyche, we can further understand how Earth’s core came to be. The mission could also provide insights into the formation of our solar system and the planetary systems around other stars.
According to NASA, this marks humanity’s first exploration of a world made largely of metal. The Psyche spacecraft will use special tools to identify the types of materials that make up the asteroid. Is it actually iron and nickel, for instance? Or something else? The craft will also measure Psyche’s gravity and magnetic field and ascertain the asteroid’s topography. All of this will tell us more about Psyche’s formation history and evolution.
What Is the Psyche Spacecraft, and How Does It Work?
Technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida perform work on Psyche.
NASA/Isaac Watson
Measuring 10 feet by 8 feet, Psyche is a little larger than a smart car. Instead of running on traditional rocket fuel, the spacecraft will produce its own solar energy. It’s fitted with large solar panels, which make it as big as a tennis court once deployed, that will generate electricity to power the ion drive and the innovative new Hall thruster. Essentially, the electricity from the solar panels is used to convert the fuel source (xenon gas) to xenon ions that are expelled to provide thrust. (The xenon propellant also produces a cool blue glow.) Pysche will gradually build up speed using ion propulsion. The spacecraft will also swing past Mars for a gravitational push during its voyage to the asteroid.
In addition, Psyche will be equipped with an array of futuristic tech. The spacecraft will test out something called “Deep Space Optical Communication,” in which messages are encoded on photons (particles of light) instead of radio waves. It could mean transmitting far more data back to Earth in a given amount of time.
The craft will also feature a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer to identify the types of materials in Psyche; a magnetometer to measure the asteroid’s magnetic field; and a multi-spectral imager to capture high-resolution snaps of it. To top it off, Psyche will use radio waves to measure the asteroid’s gravity. This, combined with maps of the asteroid’s surface features, should give us some more intel about the asteroid’s interior structure.
How Much Will the Psyche Mission Cost?
The Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) Chassis of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA says the total life-cycle mission costs for Psyche (including the rocket) are $985 million. A total of $717 million have been spent on the project as of last July. Sounds like a pittance compared to that $10,000 quadrillion.
How Long Will the Psyche Mission Take?
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Psyche will cover some 280 million miles to reach its namesake asteroid. The spacecraft is expected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2023. The craft will aim for a gravity assist from Mars in 2026 to help it along the next stage of the journey. It will then spend 21 months measuring and mapping, gradually tightening its orbit until it passes just above Psyche’s surface. If all goes to plan, Psyche will arrive at the asteroid in August 2029. NASA says the mission team continues to complete testing of the spacecraft’s flight software in preparation for the October launch date. Godspeed, Psyche.
Check out a NASA video about the Psyche mission below:
NASA and SpaceX will soon launch the sixth crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP).
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch Dragon Endeavor and NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev to the International Space Station from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than February 26, 2023. The will spend approximately six months on the space station, starting with a short handover with members of Crew-5, who arrived at Station in October for a science expedition at the microgravity laboratory.
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First launch of Electron rocket out of NASA’s Wallops Island, VA Facility
Rocket Lab debut launch from NASA’s Wallops Island, Virginia Facility. This is the moment in which the The first launch of an Electron rocket out of the USA, HawkEye 360. Courtesy Rocket Lab’s YouTube Stream.
The first launch of an Electron rocket out of the USA took place out of NASA’s Wallops Island, Virginia facility at about 6 p.m. ET on January 24th. The launch was originally scheduled for Monday night but was canceled due to weather.
NASA prepares for Virginia rocket launch
People along the East Coast are in for a show on Monday evening, as a rocket launch happening at Wallops Island, Virginia will be visible to much of the coast. FOX 5’s David Kaplan explains how you can see the launch.
The first Electron launch from the United States Tuesday was enabled by NASA’s work in developing the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU). NASA believes that NAFTU is a critical piece of flight safety technology required for this mission.
The launch Tuesday was the first-ever flight utilizing the NAFTU flight safety system.
“In taking NAFTU across the finish line, NASA has delivered an autonomous flight termination system like no other in operation today filling a critical gap in modernizing our nation’s launch ranges,” said David L. Pierce, Wallops Flight Facility director in a statement. “We’re proud to have made this and future U.S. Rocket Lab Electron launches possible with our game-changing flight safety technology.”
Electron is a rocket type made by New Zealand-based Rocket Lab. The 59-foot-tall Electron rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 2 at Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island.
The mission, named “Virginia is for Launch Lovers,” will deploy radio frequency monitoring satellites for HawkEye 360, NASA said.
You can view the full launch video via RocketLab’s website or RocketLab’s YouTube channel.
Tuesday marks one year since the James Webb Space Telescope reached its destination, orbiting 1 million miles away from Earth.
The Webb telescope, which was launched on Christmas Day in 2021, was a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency with the goal of studying the formation of the universe’s earliest galaxies, how they compare to today’s galaxies, how our solar system developed and if there is life on other planets.
It uses infrared radiation to detect objects in space and can view celestial bodies that are generally invisible to the naked eye.
Since then, the Webb telescope has sent back plenty of images, including of stars, planets and nebula and even galaxies millions of miles away.
Here are some of the most striking images taken over the course of a year:
Engineers and technicians assemble the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Nov. 2, 2016, in Greenbelt, Md.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Distant galaxies
The first full-color image taken by the Webb Telescope was unveiled during a press event on July 11 at the White House hosted by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is the “deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date,” according to NASA.
In the first James Webb Space Telescope image to be released July 11, 2022, the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early universe was taken in less than one day. Similar images from the Hubble Telescope have taken multiple weeks to produce. The background of space is black as thousands of galaxies appear with their shapes and colors varying. These galaxies are part of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 and are warping the appearances of galaxies seen around them.
Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA
Thousands of galaxies can be seen in the image but, according to NASA, it covers the size of the equivalent of someone holding a grain of sand at an arm’s length distance.
It was also the first time the public understood how much more powerful Webb is than its predecessor, the Hubble Telescope, which only sees visible light, ultraviolet radiation and near-infrared radiation.
Cosmic Cliffs
The image, revealed July 12 during an event held by NASA, showed new details about the Carina Nebula, located in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Just the edge of the nebula can be seen, but the image shows hundreds of stars that were previously masked by a cloud of gas and dust.
Behind the curtain of dust and gas in these Cosmic Cliffs are previously hidden baby stars, uncovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in an image released July 12, 2022.
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
The area, referred to as the Cosmic Cliffs, shows a “giant, gaseous cavity” as young stars that were recently born push down ultraviolet radiation and create the jagged-looking edge.
The cloud-like structure of the nebula contains ridges, peaks and valleys — an appearance very similar to a mountain range.
Jupiter in detail
On Aug. 22, NASA revealed two new images of Jupiter taken by Webb, which show the planet’s atmosphere, rings and moons in never-before-seen detail.
The first image is a composite showing swirls of different colors, indicating Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, and the infamous Great Red Spot, which can produce winds of more than 250 miles per hour.
The second image shows Jupiter’s rings, which are a million times fainter than the planet — according to NASA — and two of its moons, Adrastea and Amalthea.
An image of Jupiter, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, released Aug. 22, 2022, comes from the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera, which has three specialized infrared filters that showcase details of the planet. In this wide-field view, Webb sees Jupiter with its faint rings, which are a million times fainter than the planet, and two tiny moons called Amalthea and Adrastea. The fuzzy spots in the lower background are likely galaxies “photobombing” this Jovian view.
Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA
Phantom galaxy
First released Aug. 30 by the ESA, Webb captured an image of the Phantom Galaxy, which is located about 32 million light-years away from Earth.
Also known as M74, the Phantom Galaxy has low surface brightness, making it hard to see and requiring clear, dark skies to do so. However, Webb’s sharp lens has captured the clearest image of the galaxy’s features.
“These spiral arms are traced by blue and bursts of pink, which are star-forming regions,” NASA wrote in a social media post. “A speckled cluster of young stars glow blue at the very heart of the galaxy.”
This image from the James Webb Space Telescope, released Aug. 31, 2022, shows the heart of M74, otherwise known as the Phantom Galaxy. The telescope has revealed gray filaments forming a spiral pattern winding outward from the center of the galaxy. These spiral arms of the galaxy are traced by blue and pink and represent regions in which stars are forming. The very heart of the galaxy is colored blue and has speckles, which are young stars that are forming around the nucleus of the galaxy.
Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA
Pillars of creation
NASA released an image of “The Pillars of Creation” — young, bright-red stars within a billowing cloud of gas and dust — on Oct. 19
The Pillars of Creation are elephant trunks, a type of interstellar matter formation, located in the Eagle Nebula, which is about 6,500 to 7,000 light-years away from Earth, according to the space agency.
The “Pillars of Creation” has layers of semi-opaque rusty red gas and dust that start at the bottom left and go toward the top right in this image from the James Webb Space Telescope, released Oct. 19, 2022. The Pillars of Creation, first captured by the Hubble Telescope in 1995, were photographed by the Webb Telescope in near-infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes. Seeing in infrared allows Webb to pierce through the dust and reveal many stars. Webb’s image identifies more precise counts of newborn stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust.
Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA
Fiery hourglass
Released Nov. 16, the Webb Telescope reveals a protostar, which is the early stages of a star being born.
The cloud of gas in red and orange contorts into the shape of a fiery hourglass.
As it draws material in, its core will compress, get hotter and eventually begin nuclear fusion, creating a star.
The James Webb Space Telescope catches a fiery hourglass as a new star forms in an image released, Nov. 16, 2022. Hidden in the neck of this “hourglass” of light are the very beginnings of a new star, known as a protostar. This protostar is a hot, puffy clump of gas that is only a fraction of the mass of the Sun. As it draws material in, its core will compress, get hotter and eventually begin nuclear fusion, creating a star.
Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA
Coldest ice ever measured
The last image released by NASA ahead of the one-year anniversary shows a molecular cloud, which is where stars and planets are born, with icy ingredients.
The telescope shows the frozen form of elements, including carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur.
This image by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) features the central region of the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which resides 630 light years away.
Space Telescope Science Institut/NASA, ESA, CSA, and M. McClure
“We’re not talking ice cubes,” NASA wrote in a social media post on Jan. 23. “This molecular cloud is so cold and dark that various molecules have frozen onto grains of dust inside. Webb’s data proves for the first time that molecules more complex than methanol can form in the icy depths of such clouds before stars are born.”
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In the fervor-filled days leading up to the November 16 launch of the long-awaited Artemis I mission, an uncrewed trip around the moon, some industry insiders admitted to having conflicting emotions about the event.
On one hand, there was the thrill of watching NASA take its first steps toward eventually getting humans back to the lunar surface; on the other, a shadow cast by the long and costly process it took to get there.
“I have mixed feelings, though I hope that we have a successful mission,” former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao said in an opinion roundtable interview with The New York Times. “It is always exciting to see a new vehicle fly. For perspective, we went from creating NASA to landing humans on the moon in just under 11 years. This program has, in one version or another, been ongoing since 2004.”
There have been numerous delays with the development of the rocket at the center of the Artemis I mission: NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever flown — and one of the most controversial. The towering launch vehicle was originally expected to take flight in 2016. And the decade-plus that the rocket was in development sparked years of blistering criticism targeted toward the space agency and Boeing, which holds the primary contract for the SLS rocket’s core.
NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) repeatedly called out what it referred to as Boeing’s “poor performance,” as a contributing factor in the billions of dollars in cost overruns and schedule delays that plagued SLS.
“Cost increases and schedule delays of Core Stage development can be traced largely to management, technical, and infrastructure issues driven by Boeing’s poor performance,” one 2018 report from NASA’s OIG, the first in a series of audits the OIG completed surrounding NASA’s management of the SLS program, read. And a report in 2020 laid out similar grievances.
For its part, Boeing has pushed back on the criticism, pointing to rigorous testing requirements and the overall success of the program. The OIG report also included correspondence from NASA, which noted in 2018 that it “had already recognized the opportunity to improve contract performance management” and agreed with the report’s recommendations.
In various op-eds, the rocket has also been deemed “the result of unfortunate compromises and unholy politics,” a “colossal waste of money” and an “irredeemable mistake.”
Despite all the heated debate that has followed SLS, by all accounts, the rocket is here to stay. And officials at NASA and Boeing said its first launch two months ago was practically flawless.
“I worked over 50 Space Shuttle launches,” Boeing SLS program manager John Shannon told CNN by phone. “And I don’t ever remember a launch that was as clean as that one was, which for a first-time rocket — especially one that had been through as much as this one through all the testing — really put an exclamation point on how reliable and robust this vehicle really is.”
The Artemis program manager at NASA, Mike Sarafin, also said during a post-launch news conference that the rocket “performed spot-on.”
But with its complicated history and its hefty price tag, SLS could still face detractors in the years to come.
Many have questioned why SLS needs to exist at all. With the estimated cost per launch standing at more than $4 billion for the first four Artemis missions, it’s possible commercial rockets, like the massive Mars rocket SpaceX is building, could get the job done more efficiently, as the chief of space policy at the nonprofit exploration advocacy group Planetary Society, Casey Dreier, recently observed in an article laying out both sides of the SLS argument.
(NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted that the $4 billion per-launch cost estimate includes development costs that the space agency hopes will be amortized over the course of 10 or more missions.)
Boeing was selected in 2012 to build SLS’s “core stage,” which is the hulking orange fuselage that houses most of the massive engines that give the rocket its first burst of power at liftoff.
Though more than 1,000 companies were involved with designing and building SLS, Boeing’s work involved the largest and most expensive portion of the rocket.
That process began over a decade ago, and when the Artemis program was established in 2019, it gave the rocket its purpose: return humans to the moon, establish a permanent lunar outpost, and, eventually, pave the path toward getting humans to Mars.
But the SLS is no longer the only rocket involved in the program. NASA gave SpaceX a significant role in 2021, giving the company a fixed-price contract for use of its Mars rocket as the vehicle that will ferry astronauts to the lunar surface after they leave Earth and travel to the moon’s orbit on SLS. SpaceX’s forthcoming rocket, called Starship, is also intended to be capable of completing a crewed mission to the moon or Mars on its own. (Starship, it should be noted, is still in the development phases and has not yet been tested in orbit.)
Boeing has repeatedly argued that SLS is essential and capable of performing tasks that other rockets cannot.
“The bottom line is there’s nothing else like the SLS because it was built from the ground up to be human rated,” Shannon said. “It is the only vehicle that can take the Orion spacecraft and the service module to the moon. And that’s the purpose-built design — to take large hardware and humans to cislunar space, and nothing else exists that can do that.”
Starship, meanwhile, is not tailored solely to NASA’s specific lunar goals. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has talked for more than a decade about his desire to get humans to Mars. More recently, he has said Starship could also be used to house giant space telescopes.
Yet, another reason critics remain skeptical of SLS is because of its origins. The rocket’s conception can be traced back to NASA’s Constellation program, which was a plan to return to the moon mapped out under former President George W. Bush that was later canceled.
But the SLS has survived. Many observers have suggested a big reason was the desire to maintain space industry jobs in certain Congressional districts and to beef up aerospace supply chains.
Much of the criticism levied against SLS, however, has focused on the actual process of getting the rocket built.
At one point in 2019, former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine considered sidelining the SLS rocket entirely, citing frustrations with the delays.
“At the end of the day, the contractors had an obligation to deliver what NASA had contracted for them to deliver,” Bridenstine told CNN by phone last month. “And I was frustrated like most of America.”
Still, Bridenstine said, when his office reviewed the matter, it found “there were no options that were going to cost less money or take less time than just finishing the SLS” — and the rocket was never ultimately sidelined. (Bridenstine noted he was also publicly critical of delayed projects led by SpaceX and others.)
NASA continued to stand by Boeing and the SLS rocket even as it became a political hot potato, with some in Congress both criticizing its costs and refusing to abandon the program.
The SLS rocket ended up flying its first launch more than six years later than originally intended. NASA had allocated $6.2 billion to the SLS program as of 2018, but that price tag more than tripled to $23 billion as of 2022, according to an analysis by the Planetary Society.
Those escalating costs can be traced back to the type of contracts that NASA signed with Boeing and its other major suppliers for SLS. It’s called cost-plus, which puts the financial burden on NASA when projects face cost overruns while still offering contractors extra payments, or award fees.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Science last year, current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized the cost-plus contracting method, calling it a “plague.”
More in vogue are “fixed-price” contracts, which have a firm price cap, like the kind NASA gave to Boeing and SpaceX for its Commercial Crew Program.
In an interview with CNN in December, however, Nelson stood by cost-plus contracting for SLS and Orion, the vehicle that is designed to carry astronauts and rides atop the rocket to space. He said that without that type of contract, in his view, NASA’s private-sector contractors simply wouldn’t be willing to take on a rocket designed for such a specific purpose and exploring deep space. Building a rocket as specific and technically complex as SLS isn’t a risk many private-sector companies are anxious to take on, he noted.
“You really have difficulty in the development of a new and very exquisite spacecraft … on a fixed-price contract,” he said.
“That industry is just not willing to accept that kind of thing, with the exception of the landers,” he added, referring to two other branches of the Artemis program: robotic landers that will deliver cargo to the moon’s surface and SpaceX’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract. Both of those will use fixed-price — often referred to as “commercial” — contracts.
“And even there, they’re getting a considerable investment by the federal government,” Nelson said.
Still, government watchdogs have not pulled punches when assessing these cost-plus contracts and Boeing’s role.
“We did notice very poor contractor performance on Boeing’s part. There’s poor planning and poor execution,” NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said during testimony before the House’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics last year. “We saw that the cost-plus contracts that NASA had been using…worked to the contractor’s — rather than NASA’s — advantage.”
Shannon, the Boeing executive, acknowledged in an interview that Boeing and SLS have faced loud detractors, but he said that the value of the drawn out development and testing program would become evident as SLS flies.
“I am extremely proud that NASA — even though there were significant schedule pressures — they could set up a test program that was incredibly comprehensive,” he said. “The Boeing team worked through that test process and hit every mark on it. And you see the results. You see a vehicle that is not just visually spectacular, but its performance was spectacular. And it really put us on the road to be able to do lunar exploration again, which is something that’s very important in this country.”
But the rocket is still facing criticism. During a Congressional hearing with the House’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee in March 2022, NASA’s Inspector General said that current cost estimates for SLS were “unsustainable,” gauging that the space agency will have spent $93 billion on the Artemis program from 2012 through September 2025.
Martin, the NASA inspector general, specifically pointed to Boeing as one of the contractors that would need to find “efficiencies” to bring down those costs as the Artemis program moves forward.
In a December 7 statement to CNN, Boeing once again defended SLS and its price point.
“Boeing is and has been committed to improving our processes — both while the program was in its developmental stage and now as it transitions to an operational phase,” the statement read, noting the company already implemented “lessons learned” from building the first rocket to “drive efficiencies from a cost and schedule perspective” for future SLS rockets.
“When adjusted for inflation, NASA has developed SLS for a quarter of the cost of the Saturn V and half the cost of the Space Shuttle,” the statement noted. “These programs have also been essential to investing in the NASA centers, workforce and test facilities that are used by a broad range of civil and commercial partners across NASA and industry.”
The successful launch of SLS was a welcome winning moment for Boeing. Over the past few years, the company has been mired in controversy, including ongoing delays and myriad issues with Starliner, a spacecraft built for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and scandal after scandal plaguing its airplane division.
Now that the Artemis I mission has returned safely home, NASA and Boeing can turn to preparing more of the gargantuan SLS rockets to launch even loftier missions.
SLS is slated to launch the Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts on a journey around the moon, in 2024. From there, SLS will be the backbone of the Artemis III mission that will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in five decades and a series of increasingly complex missions as NASA works to create its permanent lunar outpost.
Shannon, the Boeing SLS program manager, told CNN that construction of the next two SLS rocket cores is well underway, with the booster for Artemis II on track to be finished in April — more than a year before the mission is scheduled to take off. All of the “major components” for a third SLS rocket are also completed, Shannon added.
For the third SLS core and beyond, Boeing is also moving final assembly to new facilities Florida, freeing up space at its manufacturing facilities to increase production, which may help drive down costs.
Shannon declined to share a specific price point for the new rockets or share any internal pricing goals, though NASA is expected to sign new contracts for the rockets that will launch the Artemis V mission and beyond, which could significantly change the price per launch.
Nelson also told CNN in December that NASA “will be making improvements, and we will find cost savings where we can,” such as with the decision to use commercial contracts for other vehicles under the Artemis program umbrella.
How and whether those contracts bear out remain to be seen: SpaceX needs to get its Starship rocket flying, a massive space station called Gateway needs to come to fruition, and at least some of the robotic lunar landers designed to carry cargo to the moon will need to prove their effectiveness. It’s also not yet clear whether those contracts will result in enough cost savings for the critics of SLS, including NASA’s OIG, to consider the Artemis program sustainable.
As for SLS, Nelson also told reporters December 11, just after the conclusion of the Artemis I mission, that he had every reason to expect that lawmakers would continue to fund the rocket and NASA’s broader moon program.
“I’m not worried about the support from the Congress,” Nelson said.
And Bridenstine, Nelson’s predecessor who has been publicly critical SLS, said that he ultimately stands by SLS and points out that, controversies aside, it does have rare bipartisan support from its bankrollers.
“We are in a spot now where this is going to be successful,” Bridenstine said last month, recalling when he first realized the Artemis program had support from the right and left. “All of America is going to be proud of this program. And yes, there are going to be differences. People are gonna say well, you should go all commercial and drop SLS…but at the end of the day, what we have to do is we have to bring together all of the things that are the best programs that we can get for America and use them to go to the moon.”
On April 19, 2021, a toaster oven-size helicopter named Ingenuity spun its rotors and rose 10 feet above the surface of Mars, becoming the first craft to perform a powered flight on a world beyond Earth. It won’t be the last.
Three more extraterrestrial fliers are already under development at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other space agencies, and many more uncrewed copters, hoppers and floating machines are on drawing boards. These aerial robots could survey the clouds of Venus, search for life on Saturn’s moon Titan and scout out resources for Mars astronauts who might arrive in the late 2030s.
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Those missions face daunting technological hurdles, says Theodore Tzanetos, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Flying on other worlds requires ultra-lightweight materials, autonomous navigation and adaptations to extreme temperatures and different atmospheres. “With larger flying vehicles things get more complicated,” Mr. Tzanetos says. “How do you get them there? How do you make them reliable?”
But if he and his fellow rocket scientists pull it off, we will soon be touring the solar system like never before.
“There are so many things you can do with aerial mobility that you can’t do with a lander or a rover,” says Geoff Landis, a physicist at NASA’s John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “If you want to do global exploration, from pole to equator, you need something capable of flying.”
NASA’s six-rotor Mars Science Helicopter, currently under study, could be used as an aerial scout carrying scientific instruments.
Photo:
NASA (Rendering)
NASA’s Ingenuity shattered expectations of what a helicopter can achieve on other planets. Conceived as a low-budget technology demonstration and scheduled to make just five flights, the tiny craft so far has taken to the Martian skies dozens of times. Ingenuity proved that miniaturized components and large, counter-rotating rotor blades make controlled flight possible in an atmosphere that is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Along the way, it has provided unprecedented aerial views of the red planet’s surface and supported NASA’s nearby Perseverance rover.
Ingenuity’s achievements led NASA to ditch plans to send a European Space Agency rover to Mars to transport soil samples cached by Perseverance so that they can be returned to Earth for analysis. The agency now says that in 2028 it will launch a pair of new Ingenuity-style fliers, each enhanced with four wheels and a grasping arm to help collect the samples.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter have been exploring the Red Planet since touching down in February 2021. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Working with colleagues at JPL as well as NASA’s Ames Research Center and the company
AeroVironment Inc.,
Mr. Tzanetos has also drawn up a concept for a larger copter with six rotors instead of Ingenuity’s two. The Mars Science Helicopter, as the craft is known, would be able to carry up to about 10 pounds of instruments.
Then there is Dragonfly, a nuclear-powered helicopter in development at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. In 2027, NASA plans to launch Dragonfly toward Titan, where the atmosphere is four times denser and the gravity seven times weaker than Earth’s. Under those conditions, a modest nudge from Dragonfly’s eight rotors should be enough to send the half-ton science lab soaring through the sky.
“Titan’s just calling out to be flown on,” says APL’s Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, a planetary scientist at APL and the principal investigator for the Dragonfly mission.
Plans call for Dragonfly to take to the air once a month for nearly three years, logging up to 10 miles per flight, to explore a landscape dotted with liquid methane lakes, ice boulders and dunes made of grains of tar. Each time it touches down in a new spot, the octocopter will use its suite of instruments to assess the local environment, seeking out carbon compounds of the sort that scientists believe might be precursors of life. If a location seems particularly interesting, Dragonfly will collect surface samples using a pair of drills.
“We want to understand the chemical steps occurring on Titan, ones that may be like the early chemical steps that occurred here on Earth” before the first living things appeared, Dr. Turtle says.
The other moons and small bodies of the solar system lack any significant atmosphere, meaning flight by winged craft is impossible there. Undaunted, aerospace engineers are coming up with flying machines designed for those worlds as well.
While a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021, Oliver Jia-Richards came up with a concept for a glider that would electrically charge the ground and repel itself against it, like two magnets pushing against each other. Now an aerospace engineer at the University of Michigan, Dr. Jia-Richards continues to test components for a levitating glider. He envisions a two-pound, saucer-shaped explorer that could cruise smoothly over rugged terrain in airless settings.
While at MIT, Oliver Jia-Richards came up with a concept for a space glider that would levitate by charging the ground below it.
Photo:
MIT (Rendering)
NASA’s Dr. Landis has conceptualized zero-atmosphere fliers that pack more punch, powered by bursts from a rocket engine. These “hoppers,” capable of covering dozens of miles at a time, might scavenge local resources so they wouldn’t need to carry propellant from Earth. On Pluto, for instance, “we could scoop up nitrogen snow, heat it up and use it to fuel our rocket,” Dr. Landis says.
Venus presents an opposite challenge for flying machines: an extremely dense atmosphere that crushes the surface with pressure equivalent to that 3,000 feet underwater on Earth. And ground temperatures on Venus hover around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. No helicopter, glider or hopper would last long there.
In July, a one-third scale prototype of a balloon probe for use on Venus was tested in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Photo:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The solution proposed by Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, is to build an altitude-adjustable balloon probe and park it 35 miles above the Venusian surface, where temperatures and pressures are surprisingly Earthlike. The so-called aerobot would feature a high-pressure chamber filled with helium to maintain buoyancy surrounded by a lower-pressure chamber that expands or contracts to change the craft’s altitude, dodging storms and avoiding the heat as needed.
Dr. Byrne has been collaborating with a team from the Jet Propulsion Lab and Near Space Corp. in Tillamook, Ore., to develop a one-third scale prototype of the aerobot. In July, it flew successfully over Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Now Dr. Byrne is working on a proposal for a full-size version, which would resemble a huge silvery peanut, roughly 45 feet wide and 60 feet tall.
An aerobot could fly for months atop the Venusian clouds, engineers suggest, investigating one of the solar system’s greatest puzzles: Why did Venus turn hellish while Earth became lush, though the two planets are so similar in size and composition? Could the same fate lie ahead for our planet? “If it were to fly, we would rewrite the textbooks—for Venus, for Earth and for rocky planets in general,” Dr. Byrne says.
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MIT astronomer Sara Seager wonders if ancient life on Venus might have taken refuge in the clouds, and if it might still be there today. She has helped draw up plans for a mission to find out. It would send a rocket-equipped aerobot to Venus to collect samples of the clouds and return them to Earth for analysis.
A concept for a Venus airship to support a crew of two for 30 days and a permanent outpost that could operate miles above the surface.
Photo:
NASA (Rendering)
Then again, maybe the scientists will go there instead. Giant airships could enable crewed missions to Venus, Dr. Landis says. Looking further ahead, he can imagine aerial cities on the planet, with people living inside oxygen-filled habitats that float atop the dense atmosphere.
“You could do a settlement on Venus probably more easily than almost any other place in the solar system,” he says.
This illustration reflects that exoplanet LHS 475 b is rocky and almost precisely the same size as Earth based on new evidence from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The planet is only a few hundred degrees warmer than our home planet. The planet whips around its star in just two days, far faster than any planet in the solar system, but its red dwarf star is less than half the temperature of the Sun. Researchers will follow up this summer with another observation with Webb, which they hope will allow them to definitively conclude if the planet has an atmosphere. LHS 475 b is relatively close, 41 light-years away, in the constellation Octans. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
The planet is rocky and almost precisely the same size as Earth, but whips around its star in only two days.
Researchers using
A Red Dwarf Star (M dwarf) is a small, low-mass, dim, and cool star. Many have big flares and mass ejections on their surfaces. The habitable zone of red dwarf stars is closer to the star than stars like our sun, making it easier to observe potentially habitable planets.
The team chose to observe this target with Webb after carefully reviewing targets of interest from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (
A flat line in a transmission spectrum, like this one, can be exciting – it can tell us a lot about the planet. Researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to observe exoplanet LHS 475 b. As this spectrum shows, Webb did not observe a detectable quantity of any element or molecule. Common signatures in a hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, for example, would indicate a light, gaseous atmosphere. Those elements were not detected in LHS 475 b’s spectrum. The green line represents a pure methane atmosphere, which is not favored since if methane were present, it would be expected to block more starlight at 3.3 microns. The yellow line represents the best-fit model for a featureless spectrum that contains no evidence of the planet’s atmosphere. This model is representative of a planet that has no atmosphere. The purple line represents a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere and is indistinguishable from a flat line at the current level of precision. An atmosphere made up of pure carbon dioxide is far more difficult to detect, even for Webb’s advanced instruments. “We require very, very precise data to be able to distinguish a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere from no atmosphere at all,” explained Jacob Lustig-Yaeger of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “A pure carbon dioxide atmosphere may be thin like the one on Mars, making it difficult to detect.” The researchers studying LHS 475 b suggest that an additional, upcoming observation may act as a “tie breaker,” allowing them to identify any presence of carbon dioxide – or any other molecule – or rule everything out and conclude the planet has no atmosphere. Quite simply, additional data are required before a conclusion can be made. This transmission spectrum of the rocky exoplanet LHS 475 b was captured by Webb’s NIRSpec instrument on August 31, 2022. A transmission spectrum is made by comparing starlight filtered through a planet’s atmosphere as it moves in front of the star to the unfiltered starlight detected when the planet is beside the star. Each of the 56 data points on this graph represents the amount of light that the planet blocks from the star at a different wavelength of light. The data would reveal molecules in the planet’s atmosphere by showing that they increase the apparent size of the planet at only specific wavelengths. No such atmospheric features are observed in this spectrum. The gray lines extending above and below each data point are error bars that show the uncertainty of each measurement, or the reasonable range of actual possible values. For a single observation, the error on these measurements is extremely small (30 to 50 parts per million). The observation was made using the NIRSpec bright object time-series mode, which uses a grating to spread out light from a single bright object (like the star LHS 475) and measure the brightness of each wavelength at set intervals of time. Credit: Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI), Science: Kevin B. Stevenson (APL), Jacob A. Lustig-Yaeger (APL), Erin M. May (APL), Guangwei Fu (JHU), Sarah E. Moran (University of Arizona)
Among all operating telescopes, only Webb is capable of characterizing the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. The team attempted to assess what is in the planet’s atmosphere by analyzing its transmission spectrum. Although the data show that this is an Earth-sized terrestrial planet, they do not yet know if it has an atmosphere. “The observatory’s data are beautiful,” said Erin May, also of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “The telescope is so sensitive that it can easily detect a range of molecules, but we can’t yet make any definitive conclusions about the planet’s atmosphere.”
Although the team can’t conclude what is present, they can definitely say what is not present. “There are some terrestrial-type atmospheres that we can rule out,” explained Lustig-Yaeger. “It can’t have a thick methane-dominated atmosphere, similar to that of
How do researchers spot a distant planet? By observing the changes in light as it orbits its star. A light curve from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) shows the change in brightness from the LHS 475 star system over time as the planet transited the star on August 31, 2022. This observation was made using NIRSpec’s bright object time-series mode, which uses a grating to spread out light from a single bright object (like the star LHS 475) and measure the brightness of each wavelength of light at set intervals of time. The data show that LHS 475 b is 99% the diameter of Earth and therefore rocky. To capture these data, Webb stared at the LHS 475 star system for almost 3 hours, beginning about 1.5 hours before the transit and ending about 30 minutes after the transit. The transit itself lasted about 40 minutes. The curve shown here includes a total of 1,158 individual brightness measurements – about one every nine seconds. Credit: Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI), Science: Kevin B. Stevenson (APL), Jacob A. Lustig-Yaeger (APL), Erin M. May (APL), Guangwei Fu (JHU), Sarah E. Moran (University of Arizona)
Webb also revealed that the planet is a few hundred degrees warmer than Earth, so if clouds are detected, it may lead the researchers to conclude that the planet is more like
The team’s results were presented at a press conference of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) on January 11, 2023.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has made its first confirmation of an exoplanet. An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system.
The American space agency says the exoplanet is almost exactly the same size as Earth.
Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland examined new data collected by the Webb to make the confirmation.
Past observations made by another NASA telescope provided some evidence that the exoplanet existed. But the Webb’s confirmation made the discovery official.
The other space telescope is called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. TESS was launched in 2018 with the goal of discovering additional planets outside our solar system.
The exoplanet has been named LHS 475 b. The researchers said it is quite close to Earth for an exoplanet. It sits about 41 light-years away in the constellation Octans. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year.
Exoplanets are difficult for telescopes to identify. One reason is that bright light from the stars they orbit can hide them. The search process includes observing drops in the light level of stars. Such drops could be caused by a planet passing, or transiting, in front of a star.
Researchers said the Webb was able to confirm the existence of the exoplanet using the transiting observation method. They said the confirmation came quickly after just two transit events.
NASA has said the Webb telescope was developed to be able to provide a high level of detail in its observations. It is equipped with the latest technology to observe infrared waves. These waves are a kind of electromagnetic energy that cannot be seen with the human eye. NASA says the telescope’s instruments can find infrared waves through gas and dust to observe distant objects.
Jacob Lustig-Yaeger helped lead the research. He said in a statement that the telescope data made it easy to make a clear confirmation. “There is no question that the planet is there.”
The finding was recently presented at a conference of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.
Another leader of the team, Kevin Stevenson, added that he found the confirmation “impressive” because the exoplanet is small and rocky, which makes identification more difficult.
Of all of NASA’s operating telescopes, only the Webb is equipped to collect information on the atmospheres of exoplanets. But in this case, the researchers said they do not have enough data to confirm what kind of atmosphere LHS 475 b has.
Scientists generally use computer models and telescope data to study the atmospheres of exoplanets. Another member of the research team, Erin May, said the Webb telescope can easily identify a series of different molecules. “But we can’t yet make any definitiveconclusions about the planet’s atmosphere,” she added.
While the researchers said they cannot confirm what is present in the exoplanet’s atmosphere, they are very sure about what is not present. For example, LHS 475 b cannot have a thick atmosphere that is mostly methane, Lustig-Yaeger said.
The team even noted it is possible that the exoplanet has no atmosphere at all. Some of the available data suggests the exoplanet may have an atmosphere of pure carbon dioxide. But the researchers said they plan to gather more data in future observations to help them learn about atmospheric conditions.
NASA says it has so far confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets. But Lustig-Yaeger noted that the Webb telescope is much better equipped to discover small, rocky exoplanets. He said this will likely lead to a lot more exoplanet confirmations.
And, Lustig-Yaeger added, “We have barely begun scratching the surface of what their atmospheres might be like.”
I’m Bryan Lynn.
Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from NASA.
Quiz – NASA’s Webb Telescope Confirms First Exoplanet
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